President Harry S. Truman famously suggested that anyone in Washington who needed a friend should get a dog. He only said that because he didn't have my salesgirl at the department store. Her eyes just light up when I step off the escalator. Maybe that's why I go there. Of course, a dog would be a lot cheaper, to say nothing of enabling me to put something in my 401(k).

Much research suggests that a disproportionate number of young women are riding the escalator to the dress department: using their high-interest credit cards to pay for such purchases as college tuition, impulsively spending more than they mean to, buying things they don't need. In a recent survey by the finance website Iwillteachyoutoberich.com, even the relatively savvy young women it attracts were less confident about managing their money, less intent upon negotiating their salaries, less interested in saving and investing, and anticipated more dependency on Social Security than men.

Although these behaviors are serious, they won't make women as poor as other things women do: interrupting their careers and taking part-time jobs with no pension benefits, or raising children. Boy, are kids expensive. Single mothers are three times as likely to file for bankruptcy as their single, childless (or child-free, if you prefer) counterparts.

Compounding this is that in most of the country, women make the mistake of living about 20 years after retirement, three years longer than men do. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, women get fewer retirement benefits, because women are more likely to work in part-time jobs that don't qualify for a retirement plan and to interrupt their careers to take care of family members. So the gender with the fewest resources is the one that needs money most—for all the long years after retirement or when failing health impacts the ability to work for pay.

Short of calling Dr. Kevorkian, there is almost nothing to do about the pesky longevity of the American female. Here we are, breathing away and stripped of our best financial asset, a husband. As for child-rearing, an army of policy types have suggested what needs to be done to take the burden off the backs of the women who bear it—paid parental leave, subsidized day care, national health insurance. Until the country mounts the political will to change the social structure of child-rearing, however, as Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren says, "The point is, women take it on and do it." Often with disastrous financial consequences.

Spending on stuff. Working without benefits. Having the one additional child who breaks the bank. Why do women do it? Bruce Bickel, senior vice president of PNC Wealth Management, thinks that men see money as a marker of their significance, while women see it as a means to security. Put another way, men want money as an end in itself; women want money as a means to the things they really want. But that formulation just describes what's going on, rather than explaining why women view money in this way.

I believe that women engage in these financially risky behaviors because, to channel Rodney Dangerfield, they offer the easiest path to a little respect. Even now, four decades into the feminist movement, women don't receive adequate recognition for making and managing their own money. In order to become rich, women need to engage in the stereotypical male behaviors of delayed gratification: staying in the workforce (even when they don't love it), staying on a budget, and staying in the stock market (even when it's scary).

These behaviors take place mostly in the privacy of one's investment adviser's office. Such discipline is so unappealing that for the longest time, thinkers wondered why anyone of any gender would defer gratification in order to save money for investment, which was essential for everything about modern economies. One of the most credible explanations, from the legendary sociologist Max Weber, was that at the dawn of capitalism in Western Europe, men saw riches as the visible sign that God loved them and had singled them out to go to heaven, sort of the ultimate recognition. Once men realized the benefits of growing their capital, money got unhitched from the godliness and became the sole marker of their significance. By the time women got access to the good jobs and opportunities that would enable them to benefit from saving and investing, money was just that: money.

As just that—money—saving and investing has to compete with money's usefulness in buying stuff that produces other kinds of female recognition. Women are praised to the skies, for example, for visible beauty, youthful looks, and sexiness. If a woman is lucky enough to hit the jackpot by getting a marriage proposal, the weddings are typically like something Marie Antoinette might have planned. As fashion guru Valerie Steele explained in her book Shoes: A Lexicon of Style, fashion stuff rewards its owner in two ways central to female identity: It's erotic, and it marks them as a member of an in-group.

Add to this the social recognition awarded to women for mothering and for community service. Feminist psychiatrist Anna Fels attributes the mothering reward in part to the heavy influence of psychoanalysis on American middle-class attitudes to child-rearing, but whatever the cause, the job of motherhood has steadily moved into the forefront of American cultural life. Is it any wonder that we find that one unaffordable additional child or volunteer assignment irresistible? Elite women, who can make the choice, go where the cultural rewards are, with harrowing consequences for their long-term financial security.

Wanting to be noticed is nothing to be ashamed of. In her book Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives, Fels drew from her many interviews of women about their childhood aspirations in order to distill the answer to the old question, What do women want? One of the main answers was "attention, in the form of an appreciative audience." But there's only so much applause around. Since women have been providing attention to men since, say, the cave times, their recent venture into competitive attention-seeking has not been an unqualified success. A few years ago, the American Association of University Professors reported a growing number of women being denied tenure at universities because their colleagues thought they were uppity ("not collegial"). Fels reports that professions, such as business or high-powered law practices, that include the open pursuit of high recognition for "high levels of remuneration" are harder on women still. As the recent election coverage revealed, recognition-seeking women are frequently attacked on sexual grounds, being described as either frigid, castrating, or both.

Even if women succeed in high-profile jobs, society still heavily rewards them for fitting the old, mostly white, middle-class notion of femininity—entering into a heterosexual relationship, being cared for by a larger and more powerful man, and caring for others more than themselves. When, in 1998, BusinessWeek published a profile of Abby Joseph Cohen, the chief strategist for the top investment firm Goldman Sachs & Co. and one of the most important financial thinkers in the country, they made sure the readers knew that, when Cohen goes home, she "still [has] to do the cleaning and the laundry.'' More recently, in a New York magazine account of the fall of Morgan Stanley's co-president Zoe Cruz, the author felt compelled to mention that "when her daughter needed to bring cookies to school...Cruz got up at 4 A.M. and made them herself before going to the office." For women, bargaining hard for a good salary in a highly paid specialty or foregoing consumer purchases for a serious investment strategy is not the obvious path to the recognition all humans crave. No wonder even very successful women often still use the money they earn to buy recognition in controversial ways rather than amassing capital to invest.

Then women delude themselves into thinking they don't pay a price for their dependence. In PNC's recent survey of the wealthy (people making more than $150,000 a year), 49 percent of men viewed themselves as the primary financial decision-makers, while only 12 percent of women did. But a whopping 68 percent of the secondary female financial partners said they at least shared financial decision making with their husbands, while only 48 percent of the husbands thought their wives played any financial role at all. And it's not just what stocks they buy: More than half the husbands thought they also mattered more in making all decisions, even those unrelated to finances! Here, again, the women didn't think the balance of money power affected other decisions in their households. It's hard to resist the materialistic-sounding conclusion that the attention women get for indulging in financially irresponsible behavior, while heady, isn't exactly something they can take to the bank.